04/03/2011

Last week I had the pleasure of traveling to Heidelberg, Germany to meet with my publisher Kehrer Verlag and to oversee the production of my upcoming monograph No Sleep.

After an uneventful red-eye flight – I fell asleep about halfway through The King’s Speech (I know, confronted with a choice between Colin Firth and sleep, I thought I’d choose Colin Firth too) – I trained it directly from Frankfurt airport to Kehrer headquarters in Heidelberg, met the team and immediately began poring over the test print of about 30 images that was waiting for me.

That first morning is a blur – thankfully I was in the capable hands of my designer Marijke and Kehrer’s color expert Jürgen. We compared the photographs one-by-one on the test print to a batch of small reference prints I had mailed in the week before and made some minor and some not-so-minor changes to the images in Photoshop. Unsolicited advice: if you ever do a book, make sure your reference prints are really more or less how you want the final images to look. After several hours of eye-straining corrections, it helps to have that constant. We also made small adjustments to the book and cover layouts in Indesign and then I was off to my hotel for some rest!

Heidelberg is a seriously picturesque town, easy to get around in, pleasantly walkable, small yet cosmopolitan. Here’s a view of the river Nektar, with the castle in the distance on the right:

Lots of civilized picnicking and wine drinking along the river bank:

A typical alleyway in the Old Town:

And of course, the famous Castle:

(that’s a very big dog, about the size of a pony, running around in the foreground)

I enjoyed my downtime there immensely: took long rambling walks on Philosophers’ Way, ate delicious ice creams (who knew ice cream was so popular in Germany?), and basked in the sunshine.